Football Manager 2013 dev planning next three games, increasing accessibility

Football Manager 2013 was formally announced this morning, and with it the promise of 900 new features. VG247 caught up with Sports Interactive’s Miles Jacobson to learn more, and to talk about the future of the series going forward.

As so much work goes into each new Football Manger game, Sports Interactive has to think one step ahead. Except it thinks more than just one step ahead, as Jacobson told us.

“We’ve been doing this for quite a long time now,” he said, “and this is now the 20th game from people within our studio since starting all those years ago. We wanted to do something special, which is one of the reasons the new game modes are in there.

“But we tend to work – in the annual iterative cycle we’re in – by planning about three years ahead,” Jacobson added, “so at the moment, although I’m directing Football Manager 2013, we’re also pulling together the FM14, 15 and 16 feature sets at the same time.”

But rather than pile on a ton of intricate, insanely detailed features that block out the more casual or time-poor player, Jacobson said those features will still be there, but now the aim is to offer varying levels of intricacy for all players.

“So when we’re doing all that,” Jacobson continued, “what I try to do is try to make sure there’s something in there for everybody. We’ve got different sets of people who play the game in different ways.”

“There will be the ultra hardcore who will sit there and rack up a thousand hours playing the game a year,” he added, “and they want every level of detail to be absolutely perfect. So we’ve made sure there are things for them, such as a new financial system.2

“The level of detail we’re going into with that – like having individual tax regimes in countries that will make a player decide whether or not they’re going to join a particular club over another one – that’s the level of anal detail we go in to for those people,” Jacobson explained.

“But then what we wanted to do this year was have things in there for people who’ve loved our games in the past but that have maybe drifted away a bit, and that’s where the Classic mode comes in.”

“It’s a way to be able to play a season in two or three nights like you could in our games many years ago, but still having a really rich, rewarding experience. That’s why we’ve done classic.”

“The process that I basically go through is going through all the ideas that we have in there – and we’ve got thousands of them in our database – that we’ve sat through and verified as a team.”

“Off the basis of that, we’ve got to make sure we’ve got a jigsaw that fits all the different types of people who play our games, and make sure they’ve all got something new each year.”

Check back tomorrow for our full Football Manager 2013 interview.

Sometimes we include links to online retail stores. If you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. For more information, go here.